Ryan McCuaig

Links

On AI and the golem - “We are teetering on the edge of the collapse of this particular bubble, and there’s no doubt that ordinary people who didn’t waste precious resources generating sub-par horny images are going to pay the price. Unfortunately, there is very little I can do for us in that regard. What I can do is highlight the fact that the people of the past already answered the philosophical questions surrounding this particular bad idea for us. As we are constantly told that the arts and humanities have no value, and that we can have machines do that work for us, I think this is an important reminder. To be human is to do the work. For better or worse.”

Choosing friction - That feeling when you're pretty sure you've found one of your people.
Right Turn of Death - What the what the right-turn-on-a-red-light is _younger than I am_ and was a largely-ineffective idea to save gas during the oil shocks of the 1970s.

Who Goes Nazi? - From 1941: “It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi.”
Dewaffling the tech industry

A curated collection of answers that Rich gave throughout the history of Clojure - One of those resources to re-read every year or two.
Simple TUIs with Babashka and Gum - Text-based interfaces at the shell make a nice alternative to having to either make a local webapp or wrestle with SwiftUI.
Keeping Secrets Out of Logs - “So, there are some problems that are annoying. And there are some problems that are difficult. This is both. I’m gonna level with you: I absolutely hate this problem.”

An AI’s Prediction Of The Future Of Art - “I asked an AI to predict the near future of art and creative work. This is the story it told me.”

How to Structure a Clojure Web App 101 - “What has been a challenge is explaining what exactly it is that these libraries do. Doing that - really doing that - requires a mountain of shared context that folks simply do not have.”

On the foolishness of 'natural language programming' - “It was a significant improvement that now many a silly mistake did result in an error message instead of in an erroneous answer. (And even this improvement wasn't universally appreciated: some people found error messages they couldn't ignore more annoying than wrong results, and, when judging the relative merits of programming languages, some still seem to equate "the ease of programming" with the ease of making undetected mistakes.)”

HUMAN_FALLBACK - A wonderfully-written memoir of time spent being behind the curtain of a Potemkin AI.
Why Clojure? - An overview of what makes it a pleasure to work in.

Situated Software - Re-reading Clay Shirky articles I first read before the Facebook era just hurts. I hear a Ron Howard Arrested Development Narrator voice in the back of my head saying, "But unfortunately, Facebook."
An app can be a home-cooked meal - If “learn to code” were meant the same way as “learn to cook.”

You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism - “You can discourse and quote-dunk and fact-check until you’re blue in the face, but at a certain point, you have to stop and decide what truth you believe in. The internet has conditioned us to constantly seek new information, as if becoming a sponge of bad news will eventually yield the final piece of a puzzle. But there is also such a thing as having _enough_ information.”

Multiple Shadow-CLJS builds at the same runtime - A neat little hack to run shadow-cljs against two builds.

CodeCharta - Codebases visualized as architectural models seems very much like my jam.
A Rant about "Technology" - “Technology is the active human interface with the material world. But the word is consistently misused to mean only the enormously complex and specialised technologies of the past few decades, supported by massive exploitation both of natural and human resources. This is not an acceptable use of the word.”

Algebraic Effects(-ish Things) in Clojure - lilac.town - An exploration of what an algebraic effect system might look like in Clojure.
Case Study ⸺ Tracing Command Chains through Time and Location - Using Datomic to map chains of command in the Myanmar military, because it’s well-suited to tracking shifting graphs over time. Surfacing a “claim” about someone commanding someone else as a reified thing in the data model lets them track the provenance of the derived graph in an interesting way.

JAR on 'Object-Oriented' - "Because OO is a moving target, OO zealots will choose some subset of this menu by whim and then use it to try to convince you that you are a loser."
In defense of blub studies - "So I always feel a little bit embarrassed and boring when I instead suggest going really deep on what you already know: your main programming language, web framework, object-relational mapper, UI library, version control system, database, Unix tools, etc. It’s not shiny or esoteric, but for me, building a detailed mental model of those (and how they compare to alternatives) might be the learning that’s contributed most to my effectiveness as an engineer."

I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps, and I can’t stop - I enjoy reading about this kind of thing, then get annoyed that this Filemaker-1998ish kind of itch-scratching is so janky and provisional and snuck into the free tier.

Ghostty - Ghostty came out yesterday, if you're into terminal emulators.
filipesilva/datomic-pro-sqlite - Datomic is so abstract on the storage end that it took me a long time to figure out how to ... store stuff. Thus, I am really liking this docker image for quickly setting up a transactor that uses sqlite. (For low to medium write volumes this seems fine, since architecturally nothing is competing with the transactor for writes anyway.